We hope you enjoyed a spooky (and for those of you in Sandy’s path, a safe) Halloween! We were so excited to receive your responses about how you used TOON books to help your children learn about the different aspects of scariness, surprise and more. As promised, here are the results for our giveaway. We’ve chosen one grand winner to receive a copy of the book discussed in their experience, and two more runners up to receive a beautiful color poster for Frank Viva’s A Trip to the Bottom of the World poster.
Our grand winner, Margie Knauff, chose Chick and Chickie to read with her child. Here’s her story:
“I printed out the Chick and Chickie book (since we already have Jack and the Box, and new books are always more exciting) and brought it home for my 6 year old who is just starting to get the idea of how reading works.
Now that he is in first grade, he had daily homework of 15 minutes of reading a day, and I thought this would be a good idea to get him excited about reading homework. I was right! He loved being able to read the new (to him) TOON book as part of his homework and he thought the story was funny. We discussed the story questions you suggested – he could easily explain why the A was afraid of the eraser, but he had more difficulty with the difference between a face and a mask. Eventually we came up with the idea that a face can have many different expressions, but masks usually only have one expression.
Although reading is popular in our family, it is not so much fun when it is homework. So it was nice to see him excited about doing homework. ”
Congratulations Margie, and major kudos to her six year old son for having fun doing his reading “homework.”
And now, our two runners up:
Nova McCool:
“As a special education teacher, I love Toon Books because it adds a visual aspect to narratives even at higher reading levels. For my class, I projected The Secret of the Stone Frog for the entire class to read together. I love the talk bubbles because then kids could volunteer to read parts/be characters in the story…We’ll be finishing it tomorrow.”
We love how Nova used both the visual and written parts of David Nytra’s book to push her kids to read at a higher level. TOON’s books all marry images and words to create stories that kids can understand on a number of different levels, and we’re glad that Nova’s class had such a good time with The Secret of the Stone Frog.
Corrie Ball:
“I had my students read Stinky this week in the computer lab (using TOON Reader – Professor Garfield). They loved it! It is such a great way to introduce students to the proper order to read comics. I also shared your resource and handout at the Illinois School Library Media Association conference. Everyone was impressed and ready to start using your collection.”
Just a reminder, anyone can use Professor Garfield’s online reader to read to or with their kids — it’s even available in multiple languages for any children who might be learning a new language, or for whom English is not a native language. Kids can even use it by themselves to help them through the books when they’re reading on their own.
Even though the time for ghouls and ghosts has passed, please take inspiration from these stories and continue reading TOON books with an eye towards learning. We have resources for many of our books, including lesson plans, cartoon makers, and more on our website — you don’t need a holiday to get started.